CNT Expositions and Services LLP strengthens its commitment to the Indian digital textile printing industry by successfully hosting its 7th international conference – Digital Textile Symposium 2017 With Platinum Partner SPG Prints and Gold Parnters, Zschimmer and Schwarz, Sensient and Sarex. Other Partners included Sahiba Ltd – India’s largest digital textile printing company, Colourtex and Diamond Dispersion. DTS 2017 took place on November 16th, 2017 at the The Lalit in Mumbai. The aim of the conference conference was to delve deeper on the opportunities and market growth enabled by new high speed and high performance digital textile systems and consumables.

Our focus at CNT has always been to create business opportunities for the various stakeholders of the digital textile printing industry and charting out a sustainable growth path for this technology in India.

The conference opened with Dilip Raghavan, Partner, CNT and Managing Editor, Colourage welcoming all the sponsors and attendees and setting the tone for the days proceedings and shedding some light on future plans from CNT to catalyse digital textile printing in India. He asserted that “there is a need for a community-based approach to grow Digital Textile Printing and CNT is happy to provide the neutral knowledge sharing platform to achieve this”.

Dilip Raghavan, Partner, CNT

This was followed by the official public launch of the Digital Textile Journal among the industry experts and stakeholders. On this occasion Mr Dilip Raghavan said “Colourage has been for the past 65 years supporting the advancement of the textile wet-processing industry. As a part of the strategy at CNT to provide all tools necessary for the digital textile printing industry to grow, we will be partnering with Colourage to launch the Digital Textile Journal, a first of its kinds magazine in India focused on Digital Textile Printing”

The conference provided insight into diverse topics focused on digital printing for apparel & home textile including – market trends, technology updates, design, pre-treatment, success stories, sustainability, e-commerce and made available innumerable networking opportunities. DTS 2017 also featured an exclusive Table top exhibition area where technology & ink providers could interact with the delegates and potential clients to showcase their products & technology.

Neeraj Sharma, Audience, Zschimmer and Schwarz, Sergio Molto

Key inclusions in this edition of the conference were the sessions on dedicated pre-treament for Digital Textile, Insights from Sahiba Ltd – a textile mill with the largest output of digital textile print in India and a Panel discussion focusing on the important of Design for Digital Textile printing. The Panel was moderated by Lipika Nair and included different stakeholders from the technology including Neeraj Sharma, SPG Prints; Taran Singh, Sahiba Ltd; Raju Bhatia, Designer and Nita Kapadia, Only One Fashion. The panel highlighted and identified the various gaps in the supply chain currently and proposed the solutions and the way forward.

The event concluded with an interactive session curated by Aditya Chandavarkar and Dilip Raghavan where the floor was thrown open and a few key points were disussed including the how software is underestimated in digital textile printing, need for more training from the software providers, the debated between an open ink architecture and a closed ink architecture and last but not least the future in manufacturing digital textile printing equipment and inks in India.

Overall the conference ended on a successful note with a good concentration of end users from Surat, Varanasi, Mumbai and Bangladesh. It also saw the launch of the voice for Digital Textile Printing in India – DTJ magazine and it was a step with many to come towards building a community to grow Digital Textile Printing together in India.